MHacks V’s Winning Hack Uses Wolfram Programming Cloud

Draw Anything, an iOS app designed and created by Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs, was the winning hack at the recent MHacks V. Utilizing the power of Wolfram Programming Cloud, the two Draw Anything hackers came out on top after a fierce competition between more than 250 talented teams, made up of 1,200 hackers representing over 100 universities. Students from around the world came to learn, network, and “spend 36 hours building anything they can imagine.”

This hackathon was a race to the finish, requiring all the creativity and innovation each team could muster. “Using Wolfram was a no-brainer,” said Walch. “We needed a fast way to do computations off the device, and the Wolfram Language had so much of the functionality we needed built in already: from image processing to computing Fourier coefficients. Making the app in 36 hours would not have been possible without it!”

According to the MHacks project profile, with the use of the Wolfram Language and Wolfram Programming Cloud, “our fabulous new iOS App takes any input image, converts it into a line drawing, and computes its Fourier series expansion using the fast Fourier transform (FFT). Draw Anything creates step by step drawing guides by truncating the Fourier series at different lengths.”

“We ran our computations in the Wolfram Programming Cloud so that they would run quickly and efficiently, and so that the user would not experience any slow down in their device,” said Jacobs. “I am relatively new to programming, but it was incredibly easy for me to pick up the language and use it. I’m really looking forward to coming up with new projects to code in the Wolfram language!”

The designers also included a shout-out on their home page to Wolfram’s Michael Trott for his blog post that inspired the creation of the Draw Anything app.

At MHacks V, which was hosted by the University of Michigan and in part sponsored by Wolfram Research, teams of up to 4 members completed submissions that were judged on the usefulness, originality, technical difficulty, and design of their hacks. Including the winning hack, a total of 14 teams worked on projects involving Wolfram technologies.

The creator of one of those, WolfWeather, had this to say about using Wolfram tech: “…the language itself is something out of a science fiction movie being able to perform one hundred lines of code in two or three lines of code. I wanted to do something simple and fun, so I created WolfWeather. Its goals are straightforward: it gives users current weather updates, the time, date, weekday, the Zodiac year, and their GPS location. It also promotes the Wolfram Language and shows off a bit of the sheer power the language has as a knowledge base.”

The Michigan Daily‘s article on the event includes a brief interview with Jacobs and Walch, who revealed that they plan to continue developing Draw Anything and will be attending future hackathons, including TreeHacks and Seoul Global Hackathon.

Congratulations to team Draw Anything and all participants, and thank you, MHacks, for another unforgettable hackathon!

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